Careful reading suggested he was arrested under suspicion of selling vaccine cards, not that he actually sold vaccine cards.
What are you trying to say?
(1) He wasn't actually trying to selling vaccine cards?
(2) He was trying to selling vaccine cards but hadn't yet succeeded?
Given the evidence — the confiscated cards and the sheer number of shots already administered — both (1) and (2) seem like absurd presuppositions.
We're not a jury, and this is not a trial. We can't send him to jail, but we can say he's clearly guilty as hell.
Big mistake and with respect you're uninformed and wrong here.
If he's not convicted then your statement is an accusation of guilt. A false accusation is defamation and it's damaging to the aggrieved party.
False accusations are both harmful to the target and risky for the person making them.
You don't need to be a jury or judge to care about this, for these reasons the AP style guide and practically every journalism outlet takes this matter very seriously.
Now maybe it's 2024, you're a rando from the other side of the world on the Internet and you just do what a billion other social media randos do and you run your mouth. You think your speech doesn't really matter because in practice if you're wrong neither of you is likely to be affected, so you don't need to hold yourself to this standard.
OK fair enough. But if your speech is junk that doesn't matter, why did you open your mouth in the first place? Do us all a favor and if you're going to promote the idea that casual defamation is fine, keep it shut.
News organizations generally try to split their coverage into fact and opinion sections. It would be inappropriate to insert opinion into a factual article, but they can and frequently do weigh in on legal matters in opinion sections. The bar for defamation there is usually actual malice, so in reality it's extremely hard to prevail in suing a news organization for defamation.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
> Evidence for 130 vaccinations in a 9 month period was collected by the public prosecutor of Magdeburg, Germany, who opened an investigation of this case with the allegation of fraud, but criminal charges were not filed.
Given the amount of information they gathered about him, it seems likely that if he was doing something illegal, they would have worked it out and charged him, I guess? It seems like an odd thing to do for “personal reasons” as they say in the paper. But the pandemic was a weird event for everybody, maybe it induced odd behavior or something like that. It is hard to say.
I would tend to assume that the person’s motivation is less interesting to the researchers, and getting into it could distract from the research. Plus, who knows, maybe Germany just has really strict ethical and personal medical laws, so the researchers could just want to avoid that whole minefield.
They wont just keep stamping the same card endlessly until it is completely covered. How else is he going to accomplish this absurd undertaking but to have access to a bunch of official vaccination documents?
It's not outside the realm of possibility that he was also selling them, but I feel like Occam and Hanlon both agree that unless there is direct evidence, he's probably not some criminal mastermind getting rich. He's just a random person with either a fetish or something to prove.
From the AP story: "German police have conducted many raids in connection with forgery of vaccination passports in recent months."
This wasn't just an isolated case or idle speculation. People were selling them, regardless of whether this particular individual did.
> he's probably not some criminal mastermind getting rich
Of course not. He was a dumb petty criminal who got caught, just like countless other dumb petty criminals in the world.
I think you underestimate the power of neuroses. Good chance no money was involved.
Neurosis was my initial theory, before I discovered the news articles mentioned in the submission. "They learned of his case via newspaper reports."